Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Blog #131 Creation /Presence

Blog # 131 Creation /Presence
This is about the EXISTENCE of God and God's PRESENCE.
We do not seek ever to PROVE that God EXISTS . If someone thought they did such a thing I would think the object of his or her proof, under any name, would not be GOD. And I would imagine if we could prove God exists that among intelligent people there would be few atheists, and among the less intelligent there would be few who discovered God. But that is not the case.
If you or I could prove that God exists, I would think He is not God. To prove God exists would be in a real sense to be greater than God, to contain in your mindthe god of your proof, to control that god, to be God's God. Can or need you prove that red is red, or that five pounds is five pounds? That is something like the way it would be to try to prove that God exists.
The big question is not whether or not God exists, but whether or not God is benign or gracious, whether God is our Friend and our Father..."Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name...
To prove that God exists is one thing. To discover God around and within us is another. THAT WE CAN DO !
Once we arrive at the notion of God's 'footprints', as it were, in nature, (Wisdom 13; Romans 1: 19 ), then it helps to investigate the nature of things around us and within us in response to God's claim to be the Creator of them all. We know something of who a person is by what that person does. We know something of God through our knowledge of God's 'work' in creation. In all of creation we discover something of the Creator's power wisdom and goodness. Unless we want to say that all of it is just the product of chance, or that altogether it is its own god, then we begin to see here something of a 'shadow' of God, God's power, wisdom, and goodness. Blessed be He forever!
Modern telescopes have discovered billions of stars. Our sun, with its retinue of earth and other planets is located some 26,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way (so large that light, speeding 186,000miles a second needs a hundredthousand years to cross it!). Enormous as it is, the Milky Way is a quite ordinary example of galaxies so numerous as to be beyond our count.
We inhale about 108,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (21 ciphers after the 8 !) molecule of air in each normal breath. If we could arrange to let those molecules escape at the rate of 10.000,000 each second, it would take a million years to blowout one breath. The molecule in an air space the size of a golf ball, if placed end to end, 4,250,000 per inch, would circle the earth 10,000 times at the equator, or reach to the moon and back 52 times!
There is still the choice that anyone can make: there is no God. Two men looked out from prison bars. One saw mud. One saw stars. Some people look out and see only what they see. Others the work of a Workman, and begin to know God.
What is color in the dark, or sound unheard? Is it perhaps something like Goodness unappreciated, or perhaps like a person's life without faith?